Years before I published the Moldover’s Approach to Controllerism video that made the term “controllerism” famous, Tim Exile was neck-deep in the practice of this dark art. In 2005 Native Instruments published a video of Tim showing off his amazing Reaktor-based performance rig. This video was the inspiration for me to learn Reaktor and extend the abilities of Ableton in wonderfully fun new ways. Sadly, it was pulled down from YouTube many years ago, but Tim recently re-posted it in its entirety.

I like to give credit where credit is due, so my thanks go out to Tim for his pioneering work, and for sharing his ideas so openly. I should also thank Chris List, a Reaktor programmer in New York City, also inspired by Tim’s work. Chris saw this video as well and created the Beat Lookup Reaktor ensemble, which was essentially a copy of Tim’s unreleased “Keymasher”, but re-designed as a signal-processor so it could be used within Ableton Live or any other VST-host. Chris became a mentor to me as I learned Reaktor and pulled apart Beat-Lookup and other ensembles (respect to Lazyfish) to adapt them to my custom controllers.

Check out Tim’s history-making video., and remember that 2005 was the same year YouTube was launched.

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